Black fern frond tattoo with spiral koru-style details on the inner wrist, shown in a sepia photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fern frond tattoo on the wrist

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single fern frond is tattooed on the inner wrist and forearm, curving diagonally from the wrist upwards. The frond combines solid filled black sections with fine parallel hatching along its edges, and its base is decorated with interlocking spirals. The photograph has a warm sepia tone, and the ink is entirely black.

Blackwork Botanical Forearm Fern Frond Spiral Leaf

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the kettle's only just gone off. You'll want to hear about the fern in the tin, because the tin is still on the back shelf of the Mabel Jane, behind the bottles of linseed. Nobody opens it. That's the rule.

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Forty winters back, a lad called Wiremu came off a Rotterdam boat with one bag and a biscuit tin. He'd worked the locks from Brentford to Braunston, hauling ropes that took the skin off his palms, and never once complained of the rain. Each night he sat on the cabin step and lifted the lid a crack, just enough to see the frond inside, pressed flat and gone the colour of weak tea. His gran had sent it from a hill above the harbour where the ferns grew taller than a man. The tip curled like a question mark, she'd written on the paper, and it would keep curling until somebody answered it.

The winter the river froze, the Mabel Jane stuck in Cowley lock and the water went to slate. Wiremu lost his nerve, and his bag went over the side with the spare rope. He sat in the cold with the tin on his knees and did what his gran had done. He drew the frond on the back of the lock-keeper's ledger, spiral at the foot, one curl unwinding into the next, until his fingers stopped shaking.

In spring the ice went. The lock-keeper's daughter, Nell, leaned over the rail and asked what the curl meant, and he told her it was the place where a thing starts again. She laughed and said that sounded like a bad recipe. He never went home. Every April, when the bank starts to green, someone on the Mabel Jane lifts the lid and checks the frond has not uncurled.